Portrait of Boris Evgenievich Kochno

Sergei Yurievich Soudeikine designed sets for the Ballets Russes and was close with Serge Diaghilev. This handsome profile portrait depicts Boris Kochno (1904-1990), who, as dancer, poet, and librettist, and as Diaghilev's lover and close collaborator, was a significant figure in the international world of ballet. In 1921, the year of this portrait, he wrote the libretto for Igor Stravinsky's one-act comic opera Mavra, based on Alexander Pushkin's The Little House in Kolomna (1830).